Bounty Hunter Archive

Where would I find more information about the test center server? Can I just join it? or do i have to sign up or something?

Ok, this is not a commando bitch / whine thread. This is my take on how the interactions work between us and the game we're trying to play, mostly because I'm tired of all of us (myself included) slamming the dev team who's trying to fix a game that they probably didn't want to release in the first place.

The original mistake: Summer roles around, marketing goes to the dev team lead and they have a meeting about the state of development, bugs, features and whatnot. Dev guy says: "I'm really sorry but we're still missing a ton of content that we expect to have done by end of summer, and we have alot of class features and balancing to implement." Marketing guy: "We're releasing this at the beginning of summer, otherwise we're not going to get the return on investment that we need right now to deal with our obligations. Fix the most glaring issues that prevent people from getting in game and experiencing it, worry about balance and higher end content later"

Dev guy takes a gulp and goes off, talks to his people, they get together with the community manager and marketing and work out their priority list.

Game is released, dev's cringe, realizing that they're going to be working a whole lot of late nights and weekends for the whole summer.

Immediately a flood of exploits come rolling in that they weren't aware of. Major showstoppers appear, server stability issues show up because of the immense load of new players hitting servers they didn't have time to fully test. Dev team is redirected from their priorities to keep players from advancing too quickly as having master level characters on a brand new server will ruin the customer experience of new players.

Dev team continues dealing with interruptions in their schedule while working short handed and overtime. Marketing screams at them for releasing a game in its current state. Community manager comes to the Devs and say: "people aren't happy, fix them." Community manager and marketing revises priority list, making all kinds of things priority 1's that were 2's and 3's earlier.

Dev team splits, trying to deal with fixing current issues, while providing new content ahead of schedule because people are realizing that there really is nothing to the game beyond mindless repetitive destroy missions, as there was no reason to create the higher end content under the original dev plan. Exploits, bad tweaking/testing, improperly implemented xp gain, overpowered skills contribute to this. A weak test center community may or may not have contributed to this. Certainly lack of planning on how to efficiently use test center contributed.

Community manager brings on class correspondants, a flood of data swarms in so thick you could cut it with a bandsaw. Marketing and design look at the criticism and realize that they cant handle it while simultaneously expanding the game world so that players aren't gated and becoming bored. Actions on the feedback becomes limited to nerfs of overpowered/badly implemented skills in order to keep people from maxing out characters and realizing that high end content hasn't been created yet.

Welcome to the present day. This is life as usual at a software company. Those of you in the industry know what I'm talking about, and accept it. We just hate it because now our entertainment time is being taken up by issues we deal with daily.My analysis of the current situation may well be completely wrong because I have no hard data. But I suspect it's more accurate than not. As commando's, we're actually currently working more as intended than any other class. We are unable to advance quickly, and that puts us in the position where they can keep us interested in what's going on. What they probably really want is for other classes to advance at our rate. The lack of heavy weapons is a concern, but it's eclipsed by the fact that they're not even sure what to give us, because the whole cycle of nerfs and changes has so confused the issue of balance that they're not sure where to start. When I say they, I mean design/marketing and to a lesser extent, the actual coders.

If you made it through this monologue, I hope you dont feel I wasted 5 minutes of your lives. The upshot is, the situation can only improve. We all know this game has a massive amount of potential, it's just a question of how long we're willing to wait. I was the second commando on my server by a day, first master marksman as far as I know. I hit commando before I knew the state of our class. I then read the boards and felt a weight press down on my shoulders. I moped around for a week and a bit, and then had a bright idea. 9 days later I was a master TKA. That was over a week ago. I've barely played in the past week, waiting to see what changes were implemented before I started grinding towards another burnout. I dont plan on cancelling my account until I see that there has been a massive mistake made that cannot be altered. So far I see a large number of good changes being made at a design level, and I'm confident that eventually we will be addressed.

Best of luck, hope to see you in game.

I still luvs ya

Half-Life was the exception. Look at the results it had.

And, it's blatantly obvious that this is what happened. There is absolutely nothing to do in this game. Every combat class is the same. Every mission is the same. There is nothing unique.

yup yup sounds right and god i would love variety. same armor, same clothes, same classes diff name. love the potential of the game. but hey since i hit commandomy pistoleer skills have blown up.

mi'ko

sunrunner

Yeah, but the thing is the content will eventually come, its all about patience

Good post. That's probably about right on the money really. Alot of this became really apparent when alot of heavy heavy adjustments showed up during the last week of the beta. Its kind of a weird love/hate relationship. On the one hand I appreciate what the devs have been able to get done, on the other hand there's so much more I really wish would get done. Either way I can definitely appreciate the rather difficult position the devs are in for this game.

Only flaw in this assumptions is that, they are hell bent on releasing new content, above and beyond their current expectations prior to fixing long lasting well documented issues.

Well, in one sense I agree with Miharu, but there's one fault in his logic.

There is, and never was, anything that matches his concept of High End content.

This was a concern during Beta. People aasked "So what is the goal in this game? There's no high end content." And the Devs agreed. They indicated, however, it was not an oversight.

The concept in the game is horizontal development, not vertical. Once you've capped on a character concept, and seen all it can do, then change professions. Started Pistoleer? You've got part of the prereq's for Smuggler, go try that. This game is not designed so that someone will stay the same profession for a year.

So, there is no missing content, except for the lack of known functionality, like player cities, vehicles, and space fighter combat.

Yes, they wanted to slow game progression down, so that there was long term progression. It was not done in panic, it was done pre-release, by controlling resource qualities. As they open the faucet on better rare resources (Doonium, Polonium, etc), weaponry will continue to improve. It also ensures a long term economy.

Anyway, the basic assumptions are correct. The main problem is the Devs don't seem to understand just how bad the situation for Commandos is.

Brilliantly put.

I'm a software engineer as well. This analysis is pretty much spot on. I don't make commerical software (thank God), but, I have bosses that believe if I don't hit a certain deadline with my systems the world is going to come to an end. Lucky for me I have enough muscle and balls where I can push back, when I have to. What most non-programmers (ie, management/finance/marketing) don't understand is that putting out an incomplete and dysfunctional product is far worse than not hitting a meaningless deadline.

Bosses always say, "You can fix this once you get it out there." But, once, the software is out there they forget about it (because in there mind its done), and start pushing for the next milestone. The money people are always thinking, what's going to make/save me money, so they are always pushing for the next new "product". Thats what we have here with SWG. I can't even imagine the pressure being put on the devs to get the Space Expansion set out by next summer, and finish player cities, player vehicles, creature mounts, fix connection issues, server issues, exploits, balancing andgame crippling bugs.

"Well, why don't they hire more devs." Finance: "Sorry, our current business plan to make the profits we promised to our stock-holders/investors, doesn't allow for development team growth." Welcome to the real world kiddies.

I never understood the whole marketing/finance approach to software. They have these fictional ideas that games need to be released in the summer or during the holiday shopping season to make money. Companies like Id and Blizzard release games when they are done. No promised dates or deadlines. Sure, the gaming media pokes fun at their countless delays and long development cycles, but, at the end of the day they don't say, "Boy it was sure a long wait for WC3." They give it game of the year awards.

With all that said, in the midst of all that is facing the devs, I am impressed with the progress that they have made with the game in a month and a half. I was pleased with the changes in the last "big" patch, and I like what I'm reading about in the lastest "big" patch. We all moan about fixing the acid rifle cert, "How hard can it be?" As a dev this is my biggest pet peeve. Sure it sounds easy, but, until you understand the code and how the game was built you really have no idea. I'm 99% certain there's more behind it than flipping a bit to 1 and shoving it out on the live server. Otherwise it wouldn't have been on the Test Server for so long, or at all.

And this entire concept is going to come crashing down on them once people get completely bored with the game and don't want to change professions. Not like changing professions would help much anyways, they're all the same.

Ok, lets all take it like it is. Commando is broken. Now its probably gonna take SOE a few weeks to "fix" the "major" problems commando has been having.

That means the certs and XP distribution will probably be fixed. However as it seems now no one thinks that not having specials for heavy weapons or having encredibly poor damage on the heavy weapons as a problem. They will fix what is "bugged" but its gonna take the power of horrible months of whining to get them to realise, yes creature handler is overpowered, but commando is totally screwed.